THERE IS AN EARLY JEWISH WRITINGS WEBSITE owned by Peter Kirby which includes information on and, when available, online translations of books of the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonica, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, and the Babylonian Talmud. He also has started the Open Scrolls Project, which aims to produce a new translation of the Scrolls online. (Note to Peter Kirby: you would be better off using the DJD volumes, with their photographs, for the base text. The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition is an extremely useful resource, but it's not meant to be the basis for an independent translation: the Hebrew/Aramaic texts don't indicate doubtful and damaged letters.) Also, it was pointed out on the g-Megillot list that this project may duplicate the work of Accordance Software. But Kirby's version is designed for all platforms, not just the Mac, and he is not planning to charge for it.

CONAN GOT IT RIGHT. Last night I stayed up late to watch Conan the Barbarian. At one point in this movie, the possible future Governor of California is crucified on a tree. The nails go through his wrists, not his palms. I'm sure that proves something but I don't know what.

Conan the Barbarian movie poster


UPDATE: If first-time visitors are wondering why I think Conan's crucifixion is relevant to ancient Judaism, see this earlier post on the trailer to Mel Gibson's The Passion (and follow the bottommost link on that post for a link to the trailer itself).

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Carla Sulzbach e-mails the following:

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University is organizing an International Conference from September 15th to 19th 2003 with the title "The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity". The info below is from the "call for papers" which, of course is closed now. The conference schedule may be found at http://ww2.mcgill.ca/religion/lects.htm.

Description of the Conference

The conference on "The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity and Other Greco-Roman Religions" has three main objectives: first, it seeks to advance research materially by coordinating and comparing recent perspectives on the often separated sub-fields of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, Gnosticism and other Greco-Roman religions. Second, the conference is intended to foster emerging research partnerships between McGill's Faculty of Religious Studies and two key Religious Studies centres in Germany as well as among research universities in Montreal. Finally, we hope the conference will engage and stimulate research interests in Canada which have been moving toward a broader and more interdisciplinary approach to the religious world of Mediterranean antiquity (e.g., in the Religious Rivalries Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies)

In recent decades, Greco-Roman Judaism has become a major field of interest linking Biblical Studies, Religious Studies and Jewish Studies. The whole corpus of writings found in Qumran and elsewhere in the Judean Desert has finally been published, while new critical studies and translations have made other non-canonical writings of ancient Judaism (the so called Pseudepigrapha) newly accessible to wider scholarly study. The corpus of Gnostic literature found in Nag Hammadi has similarily challenged our understanding of the relations among Judaism, early Christianity, Gnosticism and their wider religious environment.

These texts and the new methods applied to their study have forced scholars to re-think well-established and widely accepted historical and religious constructions in the areas of Biblical Studies (Hebrew Bible and New Testament), Religious Studies (the interaction between Ancient Judaism, Early Christianity and the Greco-Roman religions) and Jewish Studies (the continuity and discontinuity between Ancient Israel, Post-Exilic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism).

At the same time scholars interested in the religious diversity and complexity of the Roman Empire have also absorbed the influence of new methods (e.g., ritual studies) for studying practices, sources, periods and regions often neglected in Classics.

This not only has resulted in a growing number of publications with an interdisciplinary character, but also in new approaches to Jewish-Christian and interreligious dialogues and concepts of religious pluralism. Thus, not only the face of the various religious traditions of the Greco-Roman period, but even the ways in which the members of present-day religions are looking at themselves are changing.

The planned conference, which is scheduled to take place from September 15th to 19th 2003 and will be hosted by the Faculty of Religious Studies, will therefore seek to cover and link the following fields: 1) Hellenistic Judaism and Greco-Roman Culture 2) Sectarian and Non-Sectarian Writings from Qumran, 3) The Canons of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint and New Testament, 4) Interactions between Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, and 5) Jewish and Christian Traditions in the context of Greco-Roman religions.

International scholars will be invited to present papers on the basis of their merits in the sub-fields of Ancient Judaism/Early Christianity/Greco-Roman Religions. A call for short papers will be sent to all members of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (as far as they do not belong to the invited speakers) as well as to all colleagues and graduate students from Montreal universities. Papers will be selected not only for general merit, but also especially for their light on the interrelations among the sub-fields named above. A representative selection of papers will be published in a congress volume.

An important motive for the Montreal meeting is the realization of hopes for closer research relationships in the study of ancient religions among McGill, Erfurt and T�bingen, a nexus into which we would also like to invite local colleagues from the Universit� de Montr�al and Concordia University.

LINDA CHAVEZ saw the rough cut of The Passion and liked it (CNSNews via Bible and Interpretation News). But was it really quite necessary to put St. Veronica in the movie? And the bit about Caiaphas urging Pilate to crucify Jesus is not in the Gospels and doesn't sound good.

ARCHAEOLOGY MEETS SUPERCONDUCTIVITY:

Archaeology turns to superconductivity (PhysicsWeb)
6 August 2003

Researchers from Israel have developed a new way to date archaeological objects that is based on superconductivity. The new technique relies on measuring the magnetic signal from lead - which was widely used in antiquity - in samples that have been cooled to cryogenic temperatures. The method could be used to date pipes, coins, bottles and other objects (S Reich et al. 2003 New J. Phys 5 99)

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The tests were done on samples from Tel Dor, Israel, which had previously been dated by other means to dates ranging from the Persian Period to the time of the Crusaders.

TODAY IS THE NINTH OF AV, the traditional anniversary of the destruction of both temples, the fall of Betar during the Bar Kokhba revolt, and other disastrous days in Jewish history. It's the culmination of three weeks of annual mourning of these events.

Here are some randomly gathered links of relevance. The Orthodox Union website has more information on the holiday. Here's an article on it in Greenwich Time. This is a Biblical Archaeology Review article by Hanan Eshel on the archaeology of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Meredith Scheck has some very modern meditations on the nine days of mourning in her new blog ReJew. And, via Protocols (which also has been commenting off-and-on on the Ninth of Av and the preceding days of mourning - keep scrolling up to today), here's a live webcast for Tisha B'Av, again from the Orthodox Union, and an audio address from the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The former also includes a link to a PDF file of Talmudic material on the fall of the Second Temple.

A healthy fast to my Jewish readers.

MICHAEL MEDVED has seen the rough cut of The Passion and was answering questions about it online. Lots of them. There's a transcript in the Washington Post.

The opening:

washingtonpost.com: Michael Medved, welcome to washingtonpost.com. You have seen this unfinished movie. First off, how is it as a film? Is it well-done, believable? Second, the controversy. Can you explain what that is all about?

Michael Medved: Yes, I have seen the movie. As a work of film it's remarkable, though flawed. Most Biblical movies are laughable -- reminiscent of "The Life of Brian" -- but "The Passion" is intense, persuasive, believable. The use of Aramaic and Latin (with subtitles) helps avoid goofy dialogue (remember, "Oh Moses, Moses, you adorable fool Moses!" in "The Ten Commandments."
The controversy, meanwhile, centers on charges from people who have never seen any version of the film that it is anti-Semitic. Those charges are unfair and inappropriate, in my opinion.

Then there's this:

New York, N.Y.: Has there been any word from scholars on how well the Aramaic language is presented? If this film appeals to every one on Earth who speaks the language, it will still need a few more viewers to break even. It is interesting, though, that the film attempts to capture the original language. Did you find this brought anything to the movie that the audience could appreciate, or is it just something of interest to note?

Michael Medved: I study in Aramaic several times a week, of course, because that is the language of the Talmud and of many prayers in the traditional Jewish liturgy. The pronunciation of Aramaic in the film is wildly uneven. Some of the actors seem to speak the language with authority, others seem to struggle with it and to garble the words. A few dozen movie goers may notice this but I'll plead guilty to being one of them.

UPDATE (7 August): The last quote is making some Christians feel guilty about their poor Hebrew and Aramaic skills. Good. Anything that motivates people to work harder at their Hebrew and Aramaic is all right in my book.

HERE ARE SOME OCCULT ENOCHIANA SITES ON THE WEB:

The Internet Sacred Texts Archive has two collections of Enochic material: Enochian Magic Archives and The Calls of Enoch by Benjamin Rowe. There is also The Enochian Web Ring which has many links to such things. Enoch lives!

WARNING: this is modern occult material, not ancient Enochic traditions. I've spot-checked some of it but by no means all. Some people will think it's interesting but others may be disturbed by it. If you are one of the latter, don't go there.

"GROUP WANTS TO LAY TEMPLE CORNERSTONE" (Ha'aretz, via Bible and Interpretation News).

The Temple Mount Faithful, led by Gershon Salomon, has asked the police to allow the group to hold a symbolic cornerstone-laying ceremony for the rebuilding of the Temple this Thursday, Tisha B'Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples.

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The police have turned them down.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Fountain, A. Kay
Literary and Empirical Readings of the Books of Esther


Wesselius, Jam-Wim
The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus' Histories as Blueprint for
the First Books of the Bible

(That's what the RBL web page and the review say, but the author's name is actually "Jan-Wim.")

Jones, F. Stanley
Which Mary?: The Marys of Early Christian Tradition

The last one is especially timely.

MORE ON MEL AND THE PASSION: I had noticed this New York Times article, "Mel Gibson's Martyrdom Complex," a couple of days ago but never got around to posting it. I was reminded today when I looked at Mystical Politics. Frank Rich does not like Mr. Gibson or his movie and some of his quotes, if they are accurate and in context, do sound pretty unsavory. I still think that the nature of Hollywood movies is to be inaccurate and irresponsible and am keeping my expectations and view of their importance correspondingly low.

UPDATE: This article and others quote the following exchange:

Asked by Bill O'Reilly in January if his movie might upset "any Jewish people," Mr. Gibson responded: "It may. It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. . . . Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability."

As it stands, this quote makes Gibson sound as if he could be saying that the Jewish people were culpable for the death of Jesus and they need to face up to it. If so, this is scuzzy. But note those suspicious ellipses. What's been deleted from the quote and how might it change the sense? Does anyone know where the quotation came from and how it read in full? What did Mel actually say?

Also, Cal Thomas saw the rough cut of the film and liked it a lot. And - an interesting aside - it seems that it contains a "unique portrayal of the resurrection."

UPDATE: I found the full transcript [sorry, not full, but without the ellipses] of O'Reilly's interview of Gibson here The full exchange was as follows (material omitted in the ellipses above is italicized):

O'REILLY: Is it going to upset any Jewish people?

GIBSON: It may. It's not meant to.

I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But, when you look at the reasons behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.

As I suspected, Gibson was saying that according to Christian theology Jesus suffered and died for everyone and so therefore everyone is responsible in some sense for his death and needs to look at their own failings as a result. Even if you find this theological notion distasteful, it's right there in the center of Christianity and it was fair game for Mel to use it. By deleting the italicized material, those who have used the quotation have left the reader with the impression that Gibson was talking in particular about Jews and thus making an anti-Semitic remark. He wasn't doing either. This is another case of "Dowdification." I don't know who doctored the quote in the first place, but it took me about five minutes of research to find the full version. The abbreviated version appeared in the New York Times (above), the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the International Herald Tribune. Who knows where it's going to spread from there? Are these major newspapers really all so sloppy that no one in any of them bothered to check the original quotation? I think Frank Rich and quite a few other people owe Mel Gibson an apology.

Which is not to say that my view of Hollywood movies, including this one, has changed any. Unfortunately, the press frequently does no better.

UPDATE: Note also that O'Reilly's question is a follow-up to this immediately preceding exchange, which further nuances what Mel said above: he was talking about people in general, not just Jews. Read the whole transcript!

O'REILLY: Is it going to upset some people to see the person they believe is God brutalized in this manner?

GIBSON: Well, I think anybody that is in the know about Jesus as God and they believe in that realize that he was brutalized and that I'm exploring it this way, I think, to show the extent of the sacrifice willingly taken. I think it's going to be hard to take, but I don't necessarily know that people are going to be upset by it.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. For more information about this blog, have a look at the "About PaleoJudaica.com" link to the right. If you are interested in ancient history, please do visit again.

UPDATE (6 August): Protocols notes that Bill O'Reilly trashes Rich's essay without even noticing the dowdified quote from his own interview! Also, I should point out that O'Reilly misspells Barbara Theiring's name. Her theories are very idiosyncratic and are not accepted by any other Dead Sea Scrolls scholar I know (and there aren't many I don't know), but if you want to find out about them you'll have to enter the correct spelling of her name in his search link. These media guys are careless.

UPDATE (6 August): In his blog Along the Tracks, Paul A. Miller pointed out Rich's misuse of the Gibson quotation a day before I did.

REMINDER TO ANYONE WHO HAS RECENTLY COMPLETED A HIGHER DEGREE IN SOMETHING TO DO WITH ANCIENT JUDAISM: I am willing to post abstracts of recently completed (fully completed, accepted, and passed, not just submitted) doctoral or master's-level dissertations. If you've finished one, please send me (by e-mail to the address above) an abstract and, if you have it, a link to any additional information on the Web. If you have ordering information (e.g., a UMI order number), give me that as well. If I think it's relevant to this blog's focus, I'll post it here. Feel free to pass this information on to anyone you know who might be interested.

DESPITE JORDAN'S RICH BIBLICAL HISTORY, its foreign tourism has dropped enormously in recent years.

THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND ENOCH SEMINAR (VENICE) WILL BE PUBLISHED UNABRIDGED ON THE WEB. This according to an e-mail from Seminar organizer Professor Gabriele Boccaccini. Excellent!

WAS JESUS MARRIED TO MARY MAGDALENE? The bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has been getting some press lately for having this as part of the plot line. It does play off a real mystery in the Jesus tradition: Jewish men normally got married. It was considered a duty by the rabbis and celibacy (apart from temporary periods of celibacy by priests when they served in the Temple) was quite unusual. Philo, Josephus, and Pliny tell us that at least one faction of the Essenes were celibate men. (If the Dead Sea Scrolls were collected by Essenes, as I think they probably were, it is interesting to note that none of the texts ever refer explicitly to celibacy. It is possible to take the Community Rule as the constitution of a celibate group living at Qumran, although I don't find this interpretation persuasive myself. And one passage in the Damascus Document (CD VII.4b-7) could be read as referring to a celibate group, but it need not. The archaeology of the site of Qumran seems to be fairly consistent with the possibility of a quasi-monastic group living there, but it isn't by any means necessary to interpret it that way.) And Philo also tells about a celibate Jewish community (male and female) in Egypt called the Therapeutae.

So Jesus' marital status is a mystery. We would expect, a priori, that he would have been married, but the tradition tells us nothing about his wife, if he had one, and I can think of no good reason the Gospel writers would have wanted to hide the fact if he was married. But it would have been unusual, although not unprecedented for a Jewish man of that period to be celibate. Like the Essenes, he may have renounced marriage for the sake of his ministry. Most people assume that this is the case.

Judging by its sales records, The Da Vinci Code is probably a good read, although I doubt I'll get around to it myself. I have too many science fiction novels heaped up at home crying for attention. But I wish the author weren't so confident that it is actually true that Jesus was married to Mary. You can read the arguments for this in the linked review. I'm not impressed by them. If Jesus was married, I suppose Mary Magdelene is a possible candidate for his wife. But nothing in the traditions we have says anything about his being married, even though his family is mentioned a number of times. Like so much about Jesus, we just don't know.

I'm not an expert on the area of women in the Gospels, and these are just my extemporaneous musings. (Come to think of it, most of what I say here is extemporaneous musing. I blog, you decide.) If you want to read the latest serious scholarship on Mary Magdelene and other women in the Gospels, see Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels by my colleague Professor Richard Bauckham.

MORE ON ODED GOLAN. Excerpts from an article, with my commentary interspersed.

Relic's owner under cloud of suspicion (Boston Globe, sent by Stephen Goranson)

By Dan Ephron, Globe Correspondent, 8/3/2003

JERUSALEM -- Oded Golan shunned publicity when a 2,000-year-old artifact he owns was made public last year and dubbed one of the most striking archeological finds of the 20th century.

In fact, for a short time, the Israeli antiquities collector managed to keep his name out of the many newspapers and journals that wrote about the relic -- a burial box with an inscription indicating it once contained the remains of Jesus' brother, James. But nearly a year later, Golan is being investigated, not only on suspicion of forging the inscription, but also for allegedly counterfeiting a series of other artifacts that fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars on an antiquities black market.

Police allege he did it not just for the money, but for public exposure.

''He has aspirations in the field of archeology and maybe even religion. He wants to make a name for himself,'' said Yoni Pagis, the Israeli police officer leading the investigation.

The 52-year-old collector has not been indicted and denies any wrongdoing. And although a team of specialists assembled by the Israel Antiquities Authority ruled last month that the ''James ossuary'' inscription is a forgery, many distinguished archeologists and experts still believe it is genuine.

One of them, Gabriel Barkay of Hebrew University, said at a panel discussion last week that all great archeological finds are disputed for a time, and that questions about their authenticity are resolved only through the scholarly discourse in scientific journals.

I made the same point the other day.

He says he bought the ossuary with the James inscription in the early 1970s from a Palestinian dealer in the Old City for a few hundred dollars. Police believe Golan acquired the ossuary more recently and is lying about its origins.

As I mentioned the week before last, Shimon Gibson thinks it was looted from the "shroud tomb" in 1998. (This is not to say that he made any accusation about who took it. The tomb was looted, but we don't know by whom.)

Pagis, who dabbles in archeology, says his team confiscated tools from Golan's warehouses that could be used to create forgeries, along with relics he described as sophisticated counterfeits. Another official involved in the investigation said other burial boxes were discovered in Golan's collection with sham inscriptions.

Now that is the most interesting paragraph in the whole article. More details, photographs, etc., please!

But in an interview screened alongside the documentary this week, the director of the Geological Survey, Amos Bein, said the chemical tests did not necessarily prove the ossuary was a fake, because even something as simple as a rigorous cleaning of the box over the years could have skewed the results.

''I don't think these things should be decided on by a committee,'' said Barkay, who took part in the panel discussion after the film. ''In due time, people come to the proper conclusions and they are convinced either by one side or another in the debate.''

In due time. This is a good point that we all need to keep in mind.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JOINS THE LARA CROFT DISSING-FEST. Poor Lara: not only is her archaeology all wrong, her technology is out of date. This article has lots of interesting information on the latest archaeological hi-tech. (Via Archaeologica News).

MORE ON THE ZACHARIAH INSCRIPTION AT ABSALOM'S TOMB (Ha'aretz, via Bible and Intepretation News). In this long article, Joe Zias tells about the two years of work it took to get adequate photographs of the inscription, about his work on the DNA of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and about 9000-year-old lice found on ancient combs in caves. Emile Puech tells about the inscription's decipherment. There's also information about research on the tomb itself. Plus much more. I won't excerpt anything, because you should read it all.

WAQF MAY REOPEN TEMPLE MOUNT TO ALL VISITORS (Jerusalem Post; requires free registration; via Bible and Interpretation News).

Wakf to deliberate reopening of Temple Mount to non-Muslims
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS


The director of the Wakf said Thursday that members of the Islamic Trust will meet next week to deliberate the possibility of completely reopening Temple Mount to visitors in the near future for the first time in nearly three years.

"A new evaluation to the situation will be made very soon," Wakf Director Adnan Husseini said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday. His comments came just a day after Jerusalem police suspended the limited visits of non-Muslims to the site, just weeks after it was reopened to Jewish and Christian visitors. Police said Wednesday that the decision to again close off Judaism's holiest site to non-Muslims was made for "operational reasons," and declined to say when the visits would be renewed.

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"ANCIENT ART AT MET RAISES OLD ETHICAL QUESTIONS" (New York Times). Should scholars use and publish or ignore and boycott unprovenanced ancient artifacts obtained from antiquities dealers and collectors? A very controversial topic among specialists. Via David Nishimura at Cronaca, who also cites my earlier post on problems with unprovenanced inscriptions (but note my comments to his post).

THE TOP TEN BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES, as ranked by New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan and archaeologist Jonathan Reed, are given in this Washington Post article (requires free registration). It has a heavy bias toward discoveries that illuminate the New Testament: Qumran, with Madasa, only comes in at number 8 and there is no mention at all of the Ugaritic texts or the Iron Age epigraphic finds. I wonder if the book this comes from didn't make clear that this was about New Testament-related finds and this article missed that point. The "James Ossuary" comes in at number one, which, despite the rationale given, seems to me to be overdoing it. Even if it turned out to be genuine it wouldn't tell us much new. The Dead Sea Scrolls (which I would rank as number one) and the Ugaritic texts (which I would rank as second) both give us vastly more new information. And the major excavations, such as Caesarea and Jerusalem (number 6) and Sepphoris and Tiberias (number 7) add much more cumulative data too.

ANOTHER ACCOUNT OF THE PREMIER OF THE "JAMES, BROTHER OF JESUS" DOCUMENTARY appears in the Jerusalem Post (requires free registration; via Bible and Interpretation News). There was a panel of experts, Oded Golan was present, and questions were taken from the audience. I always try to be wary of press reports, but if this version is accurate, the authenticity of the "James Ossuary" is still up in the air. Ultimately, this is going to be decided, if at all, in the realm of scholarly journals and monographs, and it's likely to take time.

My favorite quotation:

However, as one audience member was overheard commenting regretfully to his companion, "Too bad it was a fake. Just think how many millions of Christian tourists would start visiting the Israel Museum were it real."

Yes, quite.

THE TEMPLE MOUNT has again been closed to non-Muslim visitors.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM IN NEW YORK HAS REDESIGNED ITS WEBSITE. Note in particular its antiquities collection and its numismatics collection, both of which have items of paleojudaic interest. (If when you click on the individual items you get a larger photograph but black background with no text, try selecting the black area to the right; that made the text visible for me.) There is also a profile of their children's exhibition "Camels and Caravans: Daily Life in Ancient Israel" (Grades K - 3) which tells about life in first-century C.E. Jerusalem and which includes lesson plans with more photos of ancient artifacts.

The new website is profiled in detail by the Art Museum Network News.

A MEMBER OF THE JESUS SEMINAR TELLS US ABOUT IT.

Robert J. Miller, THE JESUS SEMINAR AND THE PUBLIC (Bible and Interpretation News)

Miller describes the Seminar's methods and replies to its critics. Some excerpts:

There seems to be a widespread assumption that academics who speak publicly about religion should keep their views to themselves if they might be unsettling to the beliefs of mainstream Christians. For whatever reason, as a guild we biblical scholars have shirked our responsibility to participate in our culture as public intellectuals. That is why most Americans seem to regard the likes of Jerry Falwell as spokesmen for �the biblical perspective� on issues of public interest. As individuals, most scholars may well be content with being irrelevant to the larger culture, but the resulting impoverishment of public discourse on religion has real consequences. One example is that it is now a viable possibility that the teaching of evolution will disappear or be trivialized as �just a theory� in the public school curricula in certain places. Why have biblical scholars stayed out of this fight and left it up to scientists alone to battle creationism in the public forum? Shame on us.

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What the Seminar has done (and what every scholar who communicates with the public has the responsibility to do) is to inform its audience that certain of its positions are shared by most biblical scholars. While the Seminar does not claim that most scholars agree with its specific presuppositions or conclusions, not even members of the Seminar agree on those, its fundamental understanding that some of the words attributed to Jesus were not actually spoken by him and that the gospels are a complex blend of fact and fiction does represent the consensus of critical scholarship.

While this is not news to scholars, it is news to the American public. A huge number of Americans believe that inerrancy is the only legitimate approach to the Bible and that to take the Bible seriously is to take it literally. Critics are right to protest that many scholars disagree with the Seminar's results, but they do a disservice if they perpetuate the impression that doubts about the historical accuracy of significant portions of the gospels are confined to some radical �faction� with �idiosyncratic opinions.� To help us think concretely about this problem, let�s move beyond general views about the gospels and consider some specific conclusions about their historicity. A survey of the Seminar�s results comes up with the following partial list of negative findings:


� Jesus did not claim to be the messiah or to be divine.
� Jesus did not demand that people �believe in� him or worship him.
� Jesus did not intend to establish a church or found a new religion.
� Jesus did not believe that his death would be a sacrifice for sins.
� There is no historical evidence that Jesus had no human father.
� There is no historical evidence that Jesus� corpse came back to life.


Those findings would surprise, even shock, most churchgoers, would they not? Yet how many critical scholars, indeed how many critical scholars who are Christians, would argue the opposite position on any of those assertions? Most of the Seminar�s positions that are perceived by the public as controversial or objectionable are actually well within the broad consensus of mainstream critical scholarship.

An interesting supplement to my comments below on historical Jesus scholarship. (Sorry, it's interesting in itself too. I just happened to be thinking about my last post when I read it.)

I think a fair number of scholars would have reservations about the first item in the bulleted list. There were other guys running around at the time who were regarded to be the messiah and such, so I would not rule out Jesus making such a claim. And Enoch and Melchizedek were human beings regarded to be gods or divine, so the concept of apotheosis was there in the first century. Whether Jesus made those claims (as he is represented to have in the Gospels) would have to be established on the basis of arguments from the surviving evidence, but the Jesus Seminar has never persuaded me to rule out the possibility.

Read it all.

THERE IS AN ESSAY ON MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION by Professor Paula Fredriksen in New Republic Online. Unfortunately, it requires paid registration. But members of the ad-hoc committee called together by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League have posted some information on the Boston College website, based on the draft of the script they saw.

Me, I haven't seen the script or the movie and, although I'm not encouraged by the trailer, I'm going to wait to form an opinion until the movie is out and I've seen it. The problems in principle with this sort of project are, first, that the four Gospels are themselves internally inconsistent and, second, they were written long after the events they describe. There is much debate on how historical their accounts of the Passion are, and serious views range from taking them to be fairly accurate to taking them to be almost entirely made up. Doing any kind of artistic account of the Passion will involve a good deal of picking and choosing, not only among the Gospels but also among the available historical-critical reconstructions.

Also, if you mix in bits of things like the Emmerich visions (and I reserve judgment on whether Gibson has or not), then any claim to be trying to present a historically plausible account goes out the window.

You can find discussion of Fredriksen's piece in Andrew Sullivan's blog here (with the full text of the letter here - and keep scrolling up for more), in David Nishimura's blog Cronaca, in Pro Deo et Patria, in a press release by William Donohue on the Catholic League website, and in Rebecca Lesses's blog Mystical Politics. Some of these commentators obviously have very strong views on the matter! I'm sure there's more, but this is all I've been able to find (and I do have other things to do).

As for my humble opinion, all I have to say is that this is a movie, everybody. It's entertainment, and there's a long tradition of movies playing fast and loose with history, science, and pretty much anything else important. Movies aren't important: they're fun, but they rot your brain. They are usually not harmless but they are trivial. If you're working on this movie (or if you think you will like it when it comes out), don't be pretentious and take it personally when people point all this out. If you're not working on this movie but you don't like what you've seen of it, don't get upset. It's not worth it. It won't bring down civilization and it probably won't cause riots. At worst it may confirm a few idiots in idiotic opinions they already hold. At best it may give a lot of people a few hours of good gross entertainment. It doesn't matter. If you want something that matters, read a good book.

UPDATE: David Klinghoffer comments on Fredriksen's essay in the August issue of Forward Magazine.

UPDATE: Upon reflection, "usually not harmless" is an exaggeration. Many movies are harmless, I suppose. What I meant is that if they deal with anything important, where facts matter, they tend to be careless and to get a lot of things wrong. But they are trivial, so let's not take them too seriously.

UPDATE (1 August): Leon Zizter comments on Fredriksen's essay in his Historical Jesus blog (permalink not working at the moment, but scroll down to the 7/26 entry).

UPDATE (2 August): David Nishimura at Cronaca (same link as above but updated), disagrees with me about the importance of movies and offers the 1915 Klan revival hit "Birth of a Nation" as evidence. Point taken. Let's hope that The Passion does not turn out to be as destructively idiotic or have such a large concentration of idiots receptive to it if it is. I think both are unlikely, myself. And I still think the best response here is to say, "It's a Hollywood movie; of course it's going to be silly." Not that I wouldn't be pleased if Mel Gibson proves me wrong.

TC HAS AN OBITUARY OF THEODORE CRESSY SKEAT (15 February 1907 - 23 June 2003), Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum until 1972. He was involved in the conservation of the Codex Sinaiticus when it was acquired and he was an authority on ancient Greek paleography, manuscripts, and codices. Requiescat in pace.

ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE DISSES LARA CROFT.

Okay, so it's a slow news day.

(What does this have to do with matters paleojudaic? Well, Lara has explored the Tomb of Ezekiel, you know. If you insist on something more serious, check out this article on "Petra's Great Temple" from a few years ago. Be sure to follow the link at the bottom of the page to the Brown University site on the excavation of the temple. As far as I know, Lara hasn't been to Petra, although Indiana Jones has.)

A BYZANTINE-ERA SYNAGOGUE IN THE GOLAN HEIGHTS has some surprises for excavators:

Archaeology / When Golan worshipers faced south (Ha'aretz via Archaeologica News

By Ran Shapira

Zvi Maoz says that every day excavations at a synagogue among the ruins of the village of Dir Aziz force him to rip another page from his doctoral thesis on synagogues in the Golan Heights. Dir Aziz synagogue, next to Moshav Kanaf, has been excavated over the last five seasons and differs in many respects from other synagogues in the area.

Until excavations began here, archaeologists had speculated that in Golan Heights synagogues the Ark was adjacent to the western wall, one of the two shorter sides of the rectangular-shaped structure. This would allow believers to face the general direction of Jerusalem while praying.

In Dir Aziz, however, the worshipers faced south toward the long wall of the structure, not the one along the width. This is indicated by a space that juts out from the southern lengthwise wall of the synagogue, where the Ark apparently was located.

In this respect, the structure of the Dir Aziz synagogue resembles that of synagogues in the southern Hebron hills. The special niche for the Ark found in the Golan Heights' synagogue is also typical of synagogues in the southern Hebron hills, and especially those found in Susiya and Eshtamoa. Another unique feature of the Dir Aziz synagogue is the bas-reliefs of animals in the stone and wreath designs drawn on the whitewash.

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NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Fisk, Bruce Norman
Do You Not Remember?: Scripture, Story and Exegesis in the Rewritten Bible of Pseudo-Philo

Azevedo, Joaquim
A Simplified Coptic Dictionary (Sahidic Dialect)

Sandberg, Ruth N.
Development and Discontinuity in Jewish Law

THE CURRENT ISSUE OF NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY has the following article:

S. W. Crawford,
"The Dead Sea Scrolls: Retrospective and Prospective"

Most of this issue is dedicated to the legacy of W. F. Albright. Unfortunately, the link to the current issue is dead.

I AM URGED TO BE CAUTIOUS about unprovenanced inscriptions such as those found in the Moussaieff collection. Cynthia Edenburg sends the following:

From p. 214 of the review by N. Na'aman of N.S. Fox, In the Service of the King. Officialdom in Ancient Israel and Judah, Cincinnati 2000, in Zion 67 (2002), pp. 213-218 [Hebrew]. The following section was translated by C. Edenburg, who apologizes if any misrepresentation has resulted.

"Fox discusses the epigraphic sources, and rightly emphasizes the grave dangers involved in depending upon materials found in the antiquities market. It should be stressed that a large part of the epigraphic findings surfaced first on the market, and it is extremely difficult to validate the authenticity of such articles. Anyone who has participated in excavations and knows how few epigraphic finds are uncovered during them, cannot help but being amazed at the endless number of findings which derive from unknown sources, and wonder what at the magic touch of antiquities robbers and dealers, into whose hands epigraphic finds fall repeatedly. It seems to me that only in a few cases, when the forgers were not adequately adept, have scholars succeeded in uncovering the forgery, but it is doubtful whether this is always possible. The antiquities market is very profitable, therefore skilled people have learned the 'secrets of the trade', and they can churn out articles whose recent provenance cannot be proven. I shall point to one example to illustrate how implausible is the picture arising from the findings amassed by now, but one could add many more cases. According to N. Avigad and B. Sass, Corpus of West-Semitic Stamp Seals published recently (1997), the number of seals and sealings identified as Hebrew is drastically greater (711) than the number of items identified as Aramaic (107), Ammonite (149), Moabite (59) or Phoenician (38). Even if we add to this number a few dozen Aramaic cylinder seals, the ratio of Hebrew items to all the others still remains unfathomable. However, we may find a self-evident solution to this puzzle, if we consider that the origin of most of the seals and sealings is on the antiquities market. "Due to these doubts, Fox decided to refrain from discussion of unprovenanced epigraphic sources. She mentions them in footnotes, but refrains from using them as a basis for any of her conclusions. In this, her approach differs from that of Y. Avishur and M. Helzer (Issues in Royal Administration in Israel according to Pre-exilic Epigraphic Sources, Jerusalem 1996 [Hebrew]), who relied heavily on materials originating on the antiquities market. Fox's cautious approach on this sensitive issue is commendable, and it supplies a stronger documentary foundation for her study than that employed by the other studies published so far."

Interesting. I recall that Robert Deutsch took us in detail through his authentication procedure for the bullae he was discussing, so the people working with this material are not unaware of the problem. This issue is, of course, quite relevant for the "James Ossuary" at the moment and it even arises for the Dead Sea Scrolls (which, of course, were mostly recovered by the Bedouin, not archaeologists). There is, for example, some doubt of the provenance of 4QGenesisb, which I published in DJD 12. It is supposed to come from Cave 4, but we weren't able to locate any fragments of it among the bits excavated from the cave, and its script and text leaves open the possibility that it actually came from one of the finds of texts from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Likewise, some documentary texts originally assigned to Cave 4 now seem actually to have come from Bar-Kokhba-era finds. But in these cases the issue is provenance and date, not authenticity.

NEW TECHNOLOGY: DNA PROFILING AND DATING OF PARCHMENT MANUSCRIPTS.

DNA could help date ancient manuscripts (Cambridge News via Archaeologica News)

By Rose Taylor

A TECHNIQUE being developed in Cambridge could help identify the date and place of origin of ancient manuscripts.

Biochemist Christopher Howe and colleagues are working on a method that will reveal which species of animal a particular parchment comes from.

By extracting the DNA of a parchment, using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, amplifying it and studying the sequence, the scientists hope to find the skin used to produce it.

Dr Howe, who works at Cambridge University's Department of Biochemistry, said: "Once you know which species of animal the parchment comes from, you might be able to see if other sheets of parchment came from the same animal using genetic finger-printing.

"Then, if you had a book whose origins you are not sure about, you could show it had similar DNA as the other parchment and you could say it came from a similar flock.

[�]

The potential applications to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related manuscripts are obvious.

THE LATEST ON THE "JAMES OSSUARY":

Experts, dealer clash over James Ossuary's authenticity (The Globe and Mail, Canada)

Associated Press and Canadian Press

Jerusalem � Is an inscription linked to James, the brother of Jesus, authentic or fake? Tempers flared over the question at the showing of a documentary about the case and a new interview dismissing an Israeli finding that led to the arrest of an antiquities dealer on suspicion of forging sacred artifacts.

Dealer Oded Golan, out on bail, was at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on Sunday night, defending his relics and his honour. Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici was there to back him up.

But Israeli experts dismissed the show with a wave of the hand, pointing to their own findings that indicated that someone forged the James inscription for profit.

The ill will between the two sides overflowed several times, as each blamed the other of conspiracy, misdeed and bad faith.

The Jerusalem screening of the Discovery Channel documentary James, Brother of Jesus and the heated panel discussion that followed provided plenty of fireworks but no clear answers.

Mr. Golan was arrested last week. Police showed items they said they found at his house, including stencils, stones and utensils.

Mr. Golan said the items weren't his. He also said that the burial box, or ossuary, that carried the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," had been in his house since the 70s, when he acquired it, and claimed he didn't know how important it was.

In June, a 14-member panel from the Israeli Antiquities Authority declared the inscription on the ossuary a clever modern day forgery. The body also labelled as fake a tablet purporting to contain instructions for maintaining the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and police suspect Golan crafted both artifacts. No charges have been filed.

[�]

This doesn't add up. How could he be required to post bail if no charges were filed?

THE FRENCH CITY OF TROYES is gearing up to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the death of Rashi in 2005.

French town hopes an anniversary will spur interest in a famous son (JTA News)

By Philip Carmel

TROYES, France, July 27 (JTA) � The project is still in the initial planning stages, but the birthplace of the medieval biblical commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac is determined not to miss out this time.

In 2005, Troyes, the ancient capital of the Counts of Champagne in northern France, will celebrate the 900th anniversary of the death of its most famous son, known to the Jewish world by his acronym of Rashi.

The author of the monumental commentary on the Talmud and the Torah, Rashi was born in Troyes in 1040, and although his grave has never been found, scholars believe he died there in about 1105.

For obvious reasons, the town missed out on the anniversary of Rashi�s birth in 1940. The Champagne region around Troyes had as its prefect Rene Bousquet, who later headed the Vichy police and was responsible for numerous roundups of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France.

[...]

Rashi�s family probably came to Troyes from across the Rhine in Germany, and he himself spent some 10 years studying in the Rhineland at Worms in the famous Yeshiva of Mainz, founded by Rabbeinu Gershom, the �Light of the Diaspora.�

[�]

Across the narrow street from the synagogue is the Rashi Institute, which provides courses in Jewish studies and regularly stages conferences.

[�]

By the 13th century, his commentaries on the Bible were being quoted by Christian theologians in Paris. Because Rashi wanted his work to be understandable for the Jews he knew and lived with in Troyes, the style and language of his writings earned him the sobriquet �Hatzarfati,� or �the Frenchman.�

As a result, wherever there is a need to explain a difficult word in the text of the Hebrew or Aramaic in his Torah or Talmud commentaries, Rashi does not hesitate to use his own language. There are therefore almost 3,000 words of 11th-century Champenois French inserted into Rashi�s writing, a valuable source for researchers of the development of the French language.

Despite the fact that Rashi both taught and wrote in Troyes, Samoun said he was almost certainly not the city�s rabbi.

Rather, Rashi, like other medieval scholars, was strict in upholding the talmudic injunction against earning one�s living from teaching the Torah.

In fact, he owned vineyards and was a winemaker � very much in keeping with the Champagne region in which he lived.

MORE ON THE SAN ANTONIO VOCAL ARTS ENSEMBLE (SAVAE) and their ancient Aramaic CD.

This Catholic Telegraph article begins:

CATHEDRAL DEANERY � A musical project has become an avenue of expanded spirituality for the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble (SAVAE), which recently performed at the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains. Their latest CD, "Ancient Echoes," is a collection of music from Jerusalem�s Second Temple era (after about 540 B .C.) and the time of Christ. Saying prayers in the language Jesus spoke, said artistic director Christopher Moroney, "is a way to understand Jesus in a more authentic way."

They also had to learn about the anthropology, sociology, religion and language of the time, he said. Although he and his wife, Covita, SAVAE�s general manager, had talked about the project for 20 years, they couldn�t proceed because they couldn�t find anyone to teach them Aramaic.

Twenty years? I can't imagine that they tried that hard. There are plenty of hungry Aramaists out there, I regret to say.

Anyhow, toward the end, there is this odd paragraph:

In some instances, the English translation can be almost opposite the original. The couple offered as an example the word "Abwoon," from the Lord�s Prayer, which emphasizes the relationship between the Creator and the created rather than the masculine connotations of the word "Father."

The word "Abwoon" sounds to me like some dialectal variant of Aramaic for "our father." Unless I'm missing some deep philological subtlety, the rest is New Age, P.C. claptrap.

Ah well, at least their music is kind of interesting.

THERE IS A SUMMARY OF THE IAA REPORT ON THE "JOASH INSCRIPTION" AND THE "JAMES OSSUARY on the Biblical Archaeology Society website (URL sent to me by reader Stephen Goranson). It looks to me as though the final verdict on the ossuary inscription will come down to how convincing geologists and materials scientists overall find the reports of the Materials Committee. Everyone agrees that the "Joash Inscription" is a fake.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS from the Review of Biblical Literature:


Dimant, Devorah
Qumran Cave 4, XXI: Parabiblical Texts, Part 4: Pseudo-Prophetic Texts


Roukema, Reimer, and John Bowden
Gnosis and Faith in Early Christianity: An Introduction to Gnosticism


Sim, David
The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social
Setting of the Matthean Community


Boccaccini, Gabriele
Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, from Ezekiel to Daniel


Jaffee, Martin S.
Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200
B.C.E.-400 C.E.

ODED GOLAN HAS BEEN RELEASED UNCHARGED.

Forgery mystery creates a Pandora's Box (The Globe and Mail, Canada)

[�]

The dispute [over the authenticity of the "James Ossuary"] has already besmirched the reputation of [Oded] Golan, the ossuary's owner. Yesterday, the middle-aged Israeli entrepreneur, an important collector of biblical artifacts, was released from an Israeli jail, where he had been questioned for five days on suspicion of forgery. No charges were laid.

Police officials said they had found the ossuary, said to be worth as much as $2-million (U.S.), sitting on a toilet in a shed on the roof of Golan's modest Tel Aviv apartment. They also claimed to have found forging tools on the premises and several semi-completed forgeries.

"I do not know whether Oded Golan is a forger," said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review and a champion of the ossuary's legitimacy. "What I do know is that the police, pressured by the IAA, have been sweating him to confess.'' Golan's release is unlikely to end the controversy.

His detention followed a report earlier this month by the IAA concluding that both the ossuary, and another controversial relic to which Golan has a middleman connection -- the so-called Yoash tablet, dating from the ninth century BC -- are frauds.

The IAA report was signed by 14 prominent Israeli academics. One has since defected, saying the oxygen isotope test on which the IAA based its conclusion was flawed. Even more problematically, Amos Bein, director of the Geological Survey of Israel, which conducted the test, is now saying he's agnostic on the question of the box's legitimacy.

[�]

Another very distinguished scholar, Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni, has also cast a vote in favour of authenticity. The problem with trying to determine whether the ossuary is real or a fabrication is that for every analysis pointing in one direction, there are counter-indications and arguments. Neither geology nor epigraphy seems capable of providing a definitive answer.

[�]

Reading the IAA report with all its appendices for the first time this week, Royal Ontario Museum archeologist Ed Keall said that, considered in isolation, some of the evidence of forgery seems persuasive.

"I am open to the idea that I have been duped by an extremely clever forger," Keall wrote in a formal response. But "there may be other explanations for the isotope readings," he added in an interview. "We really don't know the circumstances of the ossuary's life. For scientific data to be statistically valid, the physical history of the object must be the same as that of the others. And I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that the authenticity of the artifact is being determined by machines.''

[�]

Meanwhile, the debate continues. Tomorrow night in Jerusalem, voices on either side of the issue will square off in a public forum. The discussion will follow the screening of Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici's hour-long documentary on the ossuary, James, Brother of Jesus. Unless he is arrested, Oded Golan has said he will attend.

The IAA report is out? Is it available online? Anybody know?

IN RESPONSE TO MY CONFERENCE PAPER, Meredith Scheck writes in the COMMENTS section at the bottom of the following Protocols post: "It�s things like this that remind me why I�ll never again live with a Bible critic."

Don't flatter yourself, Meredith.

UPDATE: Sorry about that one. Full apology here.

"THE JAMES OSSUARY YET AGAIN" (Bible and Interpretation News)

Eric Meyers told us so! Excerpt:

What I would like to reiterate once again, as I did in my Toronto presentation, when a supposedly important artifact comes to light in an unusual way and its provenance is unknown or its owner refuses to share information about it, scholars, journalists, religious leaders, and publishers should be wary. Scientific confirmation should proceed in an unbiased and unfettered way and the host country from whence the artifact derives should be fully involved from the outset. A report should be commissioned by the Antiquities Authority as it ultimately was in Israel, and their findings should now be respected and not attacked.

Nevertheless, "Jesus ossuary' promoters unfazed by forgery arrest" (Jerusalem Post). Also, according to this article an "an elaborate archeological forgery lab" was discovered in Golan's home.

MORE ON THE BACKGROUND OF THE ZACHARIAH INSCRIPTION on Absalom's Tomb.

Jewish Yad Avshalom revealed as a Christian shrine from Byzantine era (Ha'aretz via Archaeologica News)
By Amiram Barkat

The historic Yad Avshalom monument in Jerusalem's Kidron Valley, revered for centuries as a Jewish shrine, was also a Christian holy place in the fourth century, new evidence has revealed.

A fourth-century inscription on one of the walls near the monument, recently uncovered by chance, marks the site as the burial place of the Temple priest Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist who baptized Jesus.

Scholars believe the monument was built in the first century, making it possible that figures holy to Christians could be buried there. According to Jewish belief, Yad Avshalom was named for Absalom, the son of King David, since Samuel II relates that Absalom built a memorial in "the valley of the king" which lies below the Temple Mount. Absalom died more than 1,000 years earlier.

[�]

According to Hebrew University expert Prof. Gideon Foerster, the inscription tallies with a sixth century Christian text that says Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, was buried with Simon the Elder and James, the brother of Jesus. Foerster believes the document and inscription are historically authentic.

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I'M HOME!

There's a new exhibit of Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient biblical manuscripts in Fort Worth and then Dallas:

"From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book."

Good night.

G-MEGILLOT is a new scholarly discussion list on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For more information, follow the link. (Via Jim West on Ioudaios-L.)

MANUSCRIPTS, MANUSCRIPTS, MANUSCRIPTS! Yesterday evening, Dirk Jongkind, a Cambridge doctoral student (who, bless his heart, gave me coffee in the Divinity Faculty building this morning) gave a paper on his research on the physical features of the Codex Sinaiticus (see online abstracts). Fun fact I learned: 1-4 Maccabees were already labeled numerically as such in this period (4th century-ish) and 1 and 4 Maccabees appear in Sinaiticus labeled as such. His project is good news, because this sort of thing desperately needs to be done.

This morning John W. Welch gave a paper on "The Use of Multispectral Imaging in Working with New Testament Manuscripts." He started out with a Qumran Scroll (4QGenb) which is so blackened that it is almost totally illegible to the naked eye and on a normal photograph, but which can be read easily from an infra-red photo. As it happens, I published that manuscript and worked closely with the original in the Rockefeller Museum. For some of the other Genesis/Exodus scrolls I published, it was helpful to see the original in person and I was even able to establish one or two important readings from a naked-eye examination. But not for 4QGenb: most of it is unreadable and the infra-red photograph is effectively the primary evidence for its text. In my popular lectures on the Scrolls I use slides of it to illustrate the same point made in Professor Welch's lecture.

Professor Welch's project also is working with the carbonized manuscripts of the Petra Papyri and the Herculaneum library, and other texts as well. They are able to make the invisible text on many of these blackened manuscripts stand out so that it is easily readable on their photographs.

In the discussion someone asked if we even need the manuscripts any more after this sort of imaging has been done to them. Everyone agreed that we do, if only for their sentimental value! I think a more important reason, which didn't come up in the discussion, is that we need the manuscripts because new technologies (e.g., the burgeoning field of molecular technology) will allow us to extract new information from them which we can't even imagine now.

Professor Welch also commented to me afterwards that DNA analysis has established that the parchment of the Dead Sea Scrolls were mostly made from the hide of ibexes, which I hadn't know before.

Excellent conference.

OKAY, I LIED. BLogging has not been "very light." But I'm in a hurry tonight: I need to get across town to hear a lecture on the sociology of scribal practices in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Go to the Geniza Online Database to see images of the Damascus Document ("Zadokite Fragments") and a Ben Sira fragment. I got to see them both in person today, along with the other CD manuscript and the Nash Papyrus. Made me feel like I should take my shoes off or something. Also some cool medieval things such as a letter in Maimonides's own handwriting. This online database has images of 500 manuscripts from the Cambridge Geniza collection. Pretty good: only 139,500 to go.

[There was a typo in the last number, which I have corrected.]

ODED GOLAN HAS BEEN ARRESTED. Details here. Gotta run to the next paper.

I REALLY WISH I COULD BLOG AT LENGTH on all the papers I've heard at this conference. But time and energy limits are forcing me to focus my comments on the papers I find most interesting and stimulating. I can't mention every paper I've heard and I can't comment fully on most of them, but I've heard a great many worthwhile ones and I've had to miss a number I really wanted to hear. Thanks, everyone, for all your work, and thanks especially to those who have given me permission to quote from and interact with their papers.

Some highlights from today:

Shimon Gibson spoke on "A First-Century Burial Shroud at Akeldama in Jerusalem, the Turin Shroud, and the So-Called 'James Ossuary.'" (See abstract at SBL site - see Saturday's last post for a link.) Read the abstract, but note the following additional items. Gibson reports that he has reason to believe that the "James Ossuary" was looted from this tomb in 1998. (Incidentally, I hear from more than one source that Mr. Golan, the owner, has been arrested.) He also reports that the shroud is quite different from the Shroud of Turin, but matches the description of Jesus' shroud in one of the Gospels (John, I think).

Deborah Cantrell spoke on "Ritualistic Aspects of Horses and Chariots in the Jerusalem Temple: Akitu Festival?" Again, read the online abstract. I'll just add that she referred to the many small clay horse figurines discovered in Jerusalem and other Iron-Age Israelite cities, always broken, evidently deliberately, which she thinks may have had a ritual use. I found one of these figurines at Tel Dor in around 1984 when I was a lowly assistant there.

Two papers today deal with matters related to mine. Albert Hogeterp (who was also at the St. Andrews conference a couple of weeks ago) presented on "Paul and Palestinian Jewish Culture: Semiticisms in Paul's Letters and in Greek Texts from the Judaean Desert," (no abstract, at least in the paper program book) and we had an interesting conversation on how many of his semitisms may actually be septuagintalisms. A nice tie-in with my paper. Tonight, Laurens Geeraert presents on"Semitisms in the New Testament: A Problematic Research Topic." (See online abstract.) Yep, it is. We've alread started talking.

I presented my paper this morning and got some very useful feedback and bibliography. I was asked to comment on what I mean by the "LXX," a term that tends to fall apart as soon as you poke it. Explaining what is meant by interference by THE "LXX" is not as easy to do as it might seem at first. A listener suggested that I should refer to "sub-bilingual interference" rather than "bilingual interference," since a truly bilingual writer would not show interference in his or her writings. Fair point, although another participant thought that in recent work "bilingual" could be used for a sliding scale of competency. It was pointed out that interference from the LXX could come not only in the author's work, but also in the scribal tradition: scribes could - deliberately or unconsciously - correct the language of the texts they copied toward the Greek of the LXX. Also, finding the right Semitic dialect to retrovert is not only a matter of finding the dialect of the right period, because synchronic dialect variation existed too (Qumran Hebrew, proto-Mishnaic Hebrew, Galilean Aramaic, etc.)

Tomorrow, along with more papers, is a tour of the Geniza Exhibit of the Taylor-Schechter Unit. See the Unit's web page in the links section to the right.

Incidentally, thanks to those who have e-mailed me with more information on matters I raised in the conference posts of the last few days. I will try to digest these and update the entries accordingly after I get home.

Also, a small suggestion to the conference organizers. You guys are doing a great job and we do appreciate your hard work. It has been very helpful to have a plentiful supply of water in the reception area. But having a supply of coffee there too next year would be excellent. We have to walk 20 minutes into town to find any.

Blogger already gobbled up this message once and I had to reconstruct it. So I'd better post it fast.

THE KARAITES ARE ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN LITHUANIA. At least a few of them, according to this article (Radio Free Europe - Czech Republic). They have their own Turkic language called Karaim.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO THE SABAEAN MANDEANS. But they have a long and rocky road ahead of them in postwar Iraq.

UPDATE: Uday and Qusay are dead. A good omen for the day.

AT 12:48 A.M. LAST NIGHT the fire alarm went off in my hotel. I got up, threw on some clothes, grabbed my wallet and brief case, and got out in a few minutes. It took ten or fifteen minutes to get the all clear from the fire service and they said it was a false alarm, even though I and others smelled smoke in the lobby. Maybe some one on the night staff burned their toast.

Anyhow, I went to the Judaica session last night and heard two papers on a project collecting the poetic fragments in the Talmud. I look forward to the book. Today I've been running from room to room, Hermione-like, trying to be two places at once. (Okay, I skipped half the morning for a gym session, but after that, I mean.) I heard some good papers on the Syriac lexicography project. Peter Williams presented on elements in the Greek New Testament that don't match well in the Syriac translation, pointing to some phenomena that I''m also going to mention in my paper tomorrow when talking about the Septuagint translation.

James K. Aitken gave a paper on his way cool Database of Septuagint Greek, which you can look at yourself.

Today's Apocrypha session dealt with "Gnosticism." I heard Tuomas Rasimus speak on "Who Founded Gnosticism" and Ky-Chun So speak on "Jewish Influences on Gnosticisim in the Apocalypse of Adam." The abstracts are online at the SBL site (see Saturday's post for the link - I don't have the time to put links in now). Rasimus passed out a detailed handout and So gave us his whole paper. I have both in front of me and, herewith, some friendly, polemical comments that I also made, more or less, in the session.

1. The Nag Hammadi texts (and all Gnostic texts) were transmitted by Christians in the form we have them. The burden of proof lies on anyone who wishes to assert that we need to move backwards to a pre-Christian (in these cases, Jewish) origin for any of the documents. Bob Kraft has made this point in his paper "The Pseudepigrapha in Christianity," and I have developed it further in my online essay "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?." The latter is an early draft of a chapter of the book I'm writing on Christian transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha. You can find both by going to the links section to the right, clicking on the "Courses Online" link, then clicking on the link to my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha site. Again, I don't have time to put in the links myself right now.

2. "Heresy" in ancient Judaism, insofar as we can use the term at all, revolved around disagreements about ritual praxis rather than about beliefs or theology. By and large, ancient Jews argued about praxis, not beliefs.

3. The biblical demiurge myth has profound implications for Jewish ethnic/national identity issues and issue of halakhah, Torah observance, and ritual purity and praxis. These issues are entirely ignored, not only in the Apocalypse of Adam, but in the corpus of Gnostic texts as a whole. This is a very serious problem for anyone who wishes to assert a Jewish origin for Gnosticism.

4. The ApocAdam has elements that can be read most naturally as Christian: a suffering redeemer, baptism, and even (if memory serves - I don't have the text in front of me) a play on the name "Jesus of Nazareth" near the end: Yesseus Nazareus or Mazareus or the like. It is possible to find ways to read these in ways not involving Christianity, but this is specious and unnecessary. The ApocAdam makes perfectly good sense as a document by Christians who believed in the biblical demiurgic myth.

5. The paper on ApocAdam cited no Jewish primary sources to support its assertion that the ApocAdam used Jewish sources that could not have been available to Chrisitians. Even if it could be shown that the work uses Jewish midrashic or apocalyptic sources, as it may well have, this proves nothing unless it addresses Jewish issues (such as ethnic identity or halakhah) which were mostly not of interest to Christians.

6. The argument appears to be that Jewish apocalyptic exegetical techniques could only have been used by Jews, since only Jews knew them. But the Jewish apocalypses that have come down to us were transmitted by Christians, not Jews.

7. I believe it was Jack Neusner who said "What we cannot show, we do not know." It applies here. The case for Jewish origins of Gnosticism has not been made and I myself doubt that it can be, given the evidence we have available at present.

I let Dr. So know that I would be blogging on this and I will e-mail him and Dr. Rasimus and invite them to send me any comments in response which they wish me to post.

I spent 45 minutes waiting in line to get to this computer and I don't intend to do that again. More blogging in Cambridge (after this session) depends on a short queue in future. If not, look for me on Saturday. Again, apologies for any hasty typos and half-digested thoughts.

INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE MEETS THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS? Would new scanning technology for reconstructing shredded documents help us reconstruct the Dead Sea Scrolls? I don't know. Interesting question.

ARCHAEOLOGY IS GETTING MORE DANGEROUS. Religious and nationalist concerns are leading people to take it personally. The Temple Mount is a premier example. Indiana Jones, move over.

HERE I AM IN CAMBRIDGE, blogging from an Intenet Cafe. Only they don't seem to serve coffee. Yesterday in the opening session of the International SBL meeting, Steve Mason gave a stunning lecture on "Rediscovering Josephus." He decried the usual approach of using Josephus as "background" to NT or rabbinic studies without taking him first on his own terms. My favorite sound bite was when he said that scholars try to make Josephus disgorge undigested chunks of history by performing a kind of historical Heimlich maneuver on him, or words to that effect. I've been making similar points about the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha for some time (without the Heimlich maneuver), so I found his presentation especially welcome. He also doubts the widely accepted connection between Josephus' Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He said that Josephus speaking so positively on the Qumran group would be like President Clinton praising the Branch Davidians during his 1994 State of the Union address.

This morning I went to the session on Hebrew seal inscriptions in the Shlomo Moussaieff collection. Dr. Moussaieff (who was present) is a private collector who has made his huge collection of Hebrew and Aramaic epigraphic material freely available to scholars for study and publication. All the papers were interesting but I'll just note Robert Deutsch's, since I have his handout in front of me. He spoke on royal bullae (clay seal impressions). I won't repeat specifics, but I'm sure he won't mind if I say that he displayed and commented on numerous bullae that included names of kings and names of royal officials of various types, and that this material gives us lots of new details about the Judean royal court in the monarchical period. His paper will be published in Shlomo: Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography, History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff (Tel Aviv-Jaffa) later this year. If you're into Hebrew seals, look for it.

Please excuse typos; the conditions here are a little primitive. I'm going to poke around on the Web now to see if there's anything interesting worth noting and, if so, I'll post it. Otherwise, I'll try to blog again in the next few days, but no promises.

I'M OFF TO CAMBRIDGE early tomorrow morning for the International Society of Biblical Literature conference. As promised, I have posted my paper "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Apocryphon or Pseudepigraphon Has Been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" online, along with the handout that goes with it. It replaces an earlier version that was an online lecture for my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha course in 2002 and is a short and preliminary version of a chapter in the book that I intend to finish next year while on research leave. Comments welcome, as always.

The conference starts tomorrow evening and goes until Friday morning. I will try to catch a few minutes here and there to let you know how things are going, but blogging is likely to be very light until Saturday the 26th.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to visit the sites I mentioned when I left for the Enoch Seminar. (And by the way, Avraham, if Naomi Chana was there, she didn't reveal herself to me and I can't think of any likely candidates unless she's fiddled her biographical details.) Readers should also keep an eye on Bible and Interpretation News, which invariably has interesting online stuff pertaining to the Bible.

Want more? Then have a look at The Sch�yen Collection:

This is a huge private collection of manuscripts (ancient to modern) including Qumran and later Hebrew Bible manuscripts, NT and LXX manuscripts, Latin Bible fragments, Coptic Bible fragments, biblical and Christian Ethiopic MSS, Bible fragments in other languages, other Qumran texts and materials, and much more, ranging from Sumerian tablets to Shakespeare fragments, with good photographs of most of it. The collection is located mostly in London and Oslo and most of the manuscripts are not yet published, although publication of much of it is underway.

I'm not sure our server problems are entirely over, so if you want to e-mail me about something it would be a good idea to wait until I'm back home. Have a good week, I'll blog if and when I can, and I expect to be back at my desk on Saturday, 26 July.

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS WONDERING ABOUT THE NAILS IN THE PALMS IN THE TRAILER FOR THE PASSION (scroll up for more). He cites two web pages, one of which is by a medical doctor and which includes some dodgy references (e.g., studies of the Shroud of Turin and stuff from Josh McDowell). The other is an article by Joseph Zias, who is perhaps the world's expert on the subject. In another article Zias said:

The upright remained stationary and the victim carried the crossbeam to his execution. Once the crossbeam was affixed to the upright, the victim would be nailed or tied to the cross. In the case of nailing, the nail would be driven through the wrist rather than the palm.

although he doesn't say why he concludes this. But elsewhere he is quoted as explaining:

``You cannot crucify a person through the hands because there is nothing there but skin and muscle. It will tear. It has to be through the wrist,''

So, sorry Mel Gibson, but physiology requires that crucifixion by nailing (as opposed to tying, which also happened � see both articles just quoted) was through the wrists, not the palms.

UPDATE: Sullivan cites an unnamed reader who says that a "newer theory holds that indeed the hands and feet were entry points, but that wooden washers made from the cut trunk of young trees were used for additional support." I've never heard of this and no reference is cited. Would this prevent the palms from ripping? Is there any evidence for it? In any case, no wooden washers are visible in the trailer. Sullivan also notes that Pilate speaks Latin with the ecclesiastical pronunciation.

UPDATE (21 July): Okay, the trailer does show ropes holding him to the cross. I doubt this would work (i.e., keep the hands from ripping through) but at least they're acknowledging the problem. And the Aramaic pronuciation sounds all right (Elohi rather than Matthews Eloi).

SOME PEOPLE COUNT THE REIGN OF CHARLEMAGNE AS THE END OF ANTIQUITY, so on that theory I'll link to the following story, which involves the king, a Jewish merchant, the Caliph Harun ar-Rashid, and a white elephant named Abu Abbas.

Baghdad, Jerusalem, Aachen � On the Trail of the White Elephant (Deutsche Well)

1,200 years ago three men set off on a journey from Europe to the Middle East and back. Today their trip across three cultures and religions is recreated in the Aachen exhibit "Ex oriente: Isaac and the white elephant."

Baghdad and Jerusalem. Today the cities conjure up images of armed conflict and religious strife. For many they are the epitome of the collision between the Orient and Occident, the battlefields of global interests, where the foreign other is so different and distant from Europe. But a thousand years ago the cities represented the pinnacle of cultural and religious symbiosis and were the choice destination for one of history�s lesser-known but certainly more interesting journeys.

The year was 797 in the Christian calendar (4557 in the Jewish and 175 in the Muslim dating system). Charlemagne, King of the Francs, had sent forth two of his envoys and the Jewish merchant Isaac to the court of Harun al Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad. Their mission: establish contact with the ruler of the Abbasids and observe the ways of the city on the Euphrates. Compared to the town of Aachen with its 400 some residents, Baghdad was a flourishing metropolis, a renowned place of learning and a melting point for various cultures and religions.

When the envoys departed from Charlemagne�s court in western Germany, the distant lands of the Orient were still largely unknown and exotic. The envoy�s route led them first to upper Italy, then by ship to the holy city of Jerusalem, and from there to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliph. All in all, the men traversed a good portion of the known world at the time, passing through the territories of the three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

After several months in Baghdad, the men embarked on their return journey, laden with gifts, the most impressive of which was a white Indian elephant, Abu Abbas � a symbol of friendship from the Muslim caliph to the Christian king. But because the pachyderm was so much slower than a horse, the return voyage turned into an arduous four-year adventure along the southern Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Carthage, where Isaac � who was now traveling alone � and Abu Abbas set sail to Italy. In the spring of 802, Isaac crossed the Alps on elephant-back and rode on to Aachen in the Kingdom of the Francs.

[�]

PROFESSOR SHMUEL SAFRAI has passed away.

(Via H-Judaic Digest)

We are saddened to learn of the passing, in Jerusalem, of Prof. Shmuel Safrai, Emeritus Professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University, and one of the world's greatest experts on the era of the Second Temple. His numerous publications on the Temple, the Mishnah, the liturgy, the early synagogue, and more stand as a monument to his many decades of productive scholarship. Prof. Safrai passed away in his sleep in Jerusalem at age 84.

Jonathan D. Sarna
Chair, H-Judaic

May his memory be for a blessing.

THIS IS OFF TOPIC, but it's good news for archaeologists and, I think, for the American public as well.

House Votes To Save Jobs Of Park Service Archaeologists

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page A04

The House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to block the Bush administration from privatizing two National Park Service archaeological centers and firing the archaeologists who work there.

The action late Thursday was a setback for the administration's "competitive sourcing" initiative, which seeks to submit 15 percent of all government jobs to private competition. The Interior Department has targeted the Midwest Archaeological Center, in Lincoln, Neb., and the Southeast Archaeological Center, in Tallahassee, as part of its quota under the plan.

Late Thursday, the House voted 362 to 57 to cut off funding of efforts to put the jobs of the 100 archaeologists at the centers up for bid. The measure was attached to the Interior Department spending bill, which passed late Thursday, 268 to 152.

[�]

BAGHDAD MUSEUM LOOTING UPDATE:

Roger Atwood's account of the looting of the Baghdad Museum has been reprinted by the Wall Street Journal (via Jack Sasson on the IraqCrisis list). Walter Sommerfeld's version of the same events (noted in the 23 June update here) has been reprinted by Counterpunch and Countercurrents and some similar sites. Which is more likely to be reliable? I blog, you decide.

There's lot's more in the news about the looting of Iraqi antiquities but I don't have time to track it all. The current estimate is that about 10,500 artifacts were taken from the Baghdad Museum. And serious looting continues in many ruins. (I wish someone would take up my proposal to douse the looters with liquid putrescine from the air. Anyone know who I could suggest this to?). Anyhow, I encourage you either to subscribe to the IraqCrisis list and/or to watch its archive and Francis Deblauwe's site.

ACADEMIC TALMUD STUDY is listed as #4 in Jewsweek's list of not-quite-60 hottest people and things in the Jewish universe this year. Torah is #48, God is #52.5, and Alicia Silverstone is #1. But the list isn't ranked.